Yoplait Launches French-Style Yogurt Called 'Oui'

Greek yogurt has new competition: Yoplait has just debuted a "French style yogurt" called "Oui — and it hits store shelves this July.

If you're unclear on what a "French style yogurt" is, you're not alone. According to General Mills' blog, it was introduced to the company by Brice LeRoy, an innovation product designer in the company's dairy group who hails from western France. LeRoy grew up watching his mother make "pot-set" yogurt in his family's kitchen, and the same traditional French method is used to craft Oui.

This French method involves pouring the ingredients — whole milk, pure cane sugar, fruit, and yogurt cultures — into individual glass pots and allowing the contents to set and culture for eight hours. This differs vastly from the U.S. standard for making yogurt, which involves culturing ingredients in large vats and then filling individual cups with fully prepared yogurt. "It's the simplest way to make yogurt, but it's also the hardest to do at scale," Yoplait director Doug Martin said about the French style in the General Mills' blog.

The result of the French method is a yogurt that is incredibly thick — BuzzFeed likens it to soft butter — but with a sweeter taste than the more tart Greek yogurt. Oui comes in eight flavors: strawberry, blueberry, black cherry, vanilla, coconut, lemon, peach, and plain, and each is packaged in an individual glass pot.

Yoplait's Oui comes at a time when sales of Greek yogurt are down (nearly 5 percent, according to BuzzFeed), which means that French-style yogurt could be poised to become the latest "it" product in the dairy world. "There's been no big innovation in 10 years," David Clark, the president of U.S. yogurt at General Mills, told BuzzFeed. "Greek was the last thing to happen in yogurt."